Bøger udgivet af Unsolicited Press

Glitched collabs from Andrew Brenza and Kristine Snodgrass find a neon outlet in the merging of vispo and digital alteration. This striking book features color-saturated work that enlivens the structural bombast inherent in Brenza and Snodgrass's stark visual poetry. What is glitched is not superceded nor muted, rather transformed in a true collaborative spirit.

Less Than What You Once Were begins in a pivotal moment for the speaker-during the 2008 "Battle of N'Djamena" in Chad's capital. This destabilizing experience-in which the speaker's home is broken into-results in the family embarking on a months-long departure from the place, and the narrative begins to cycle through childhood memories, from the first night when Brown lands at N'Djamena's airport as an eight-year-old boy to the failed attempt at bird hunting with a slingshot. These centering memories soon give way to stories of displacement as a young adult and, much later, a return to the country of his youth. This fragmented memoir, told in a similar, episodic style to Claudia Rankine's Citizen, is both a coming-of-age story and also a story of exile, ending in a state of dislocated adulthood, the speaker longing for a return to a childhood home that can't be accessed.

The Souls of Others is a powerful essay collection by American Book Award winner Shann Ray. Ray depicts the American west as both magnificent and destitute. The mountains are alive. The people are gritty, destitute, and resilient. Nature offers its bounty but never gives it with ease. Ray, having spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, expertly paints a place of family, sorrow, and a connection to Mother Nature that so many Americans have lost.

The poems in PAPER BIRDS do not require any background other than a certain maturity of experience, some acquaintance with poetry and its oddities, and a lively curiosity: "a splash that drew us quickly refolds itself/as the lake's plain surface over a depthless void..."As with a painting, a poem isn't a flash-frozen scene but a lively one in a reader's moment even if we can't see it so. What's there isn't waiting for us. It happens in our arrival, as our arrival: "like a team of synchronized swimmers whose legs and feet/then arms and hands form flower patterns/ briefly before a closing splash/it is flow we see and yet do not;" An unavoidable strangeness remains and must remain. The world isn't here for our pleasure nor our suffering, and poetry doesn't tell us why we have so much of the one and so little of the other, only that it is so. If it seems a particular poet is much too negative, consider the product of a thorough, open-handed negativity: "a shallow fluid 'I' walking its body from room to room/while its other face,/ strings of pulsing miracles commingled as a universe/streaming in an abyss/of virtual gaps between there-then and here-now,/watches, lives large, remembers..."